hat do you see in the domestic scenesof favorite televisions shows? A familyat meal time is a simple setting, but you maybe interpreting more than you realize. Thehome’s architecture or window views provideclues to the show’s setting, and the food on thetable, fancy or generic, suggests the family’ssocio-economic class. For ChristopherLukasik, associate professor of English andAmerican studies, examining visual elementsand how we interpret what we see is key to hisresearch process.

Visual studies, explains Lukasik, “is themultidisciplinary study of images, viewers,and vision.” The field, he says, encompasses“the things that we see, the people ortechnologies that do the seeing, and thevarious ways in which seeing is and has beenunderstood—that is, vision as a cognitive,perceptual, and cultural phenomenon.”His class influenced Yuhan Huang, adoctoral student in comparative literatureW

who employs visual studies to combine her
love of the arts with her literature studies.
For one study, she examined images of the
Chinese Cultural Revolution in different time
periods to see what they reveal about our
perceptions of this period in China.

To do so, she looked closely at the images
and their cultural context, analyzing literature
or films that refer to or are influenced by these
images. Chinese propaganda posters from the

Poster (top) “Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan” by Liu Chunhua from the IISH/Stefan R. LandsbergerCollections at chineseposters.net/gallery/e12-703.php; poster (bottom) “To go on a thousand ‘li’ march totemper a red heart” from the IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collections at chineseposters.net/gallery/e13-708.php.era provided important material. One famous1968 poster, Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan,appears again in a 1971 poster of a march toBeijing and as a wedding gift in a novel byNobel Prize–winning author Mo Yan; bothprovide clues to how people regarded Mao.Considering the images in their temporaland cultural context is important, she says,because, “The image is the same from when itwas created until now, but now the experienceof how people look at the image, why peoplelook at it, and what it means, is different.”But he stresses the importance of studyinghow images affect us now, given the highpercentage of visual content on the Internetand in social media. More than 60 millionphotos are uploaded to Instagram every dayand 350 million to Facebook, according to thelatest figures. Consumers are influenced too;another study shows that 60 percent of themare more likely to consider a business whensearch results yield an image.

“The scale of image production,
distribution, and reception is at a level
unprecedented in human history. Images are
increasingly rivaling text in terms of how we
communicate with each other,” Lukasik says.
“Students in my visual studies courses learn
to understand how images and their viewers
make meaning, to determine what role images
play, and have played in our cultures, and to
consider what it means to negotiate and use so
many images in our daily lives.”